Empty Rooms
by wordflows
Summary: One-shot. 'The royal wing of the palace was near empty; sometimes Lianne wondered if she wasn't the only one there.'


**Disclaimer:** I own anything I don't own. 

**Ages:**  
Roald: 19  
Kally: 18  
Liam: 14  
Lianne: 13  
Jasson: 10

**Notes:** Liam started knighthood a year late, to fix my brain with the Kel-time, and Lianne is not attenting the Convent; she has tutors who teach her what she needs to know.

Empty Rooms-A Tamora Pierce fanfiction  
By Forever3330

**April 28th, 460 HE**

The royal wing of the palace was near empty; sometimes Lianne wondered if she wasn't the only one there. Lianne had just turned thirteen, and Jasson ten; he was gone to the pages' wing, and he had been the last sibling she'd had about.

Liam was in the palace, yes, but gone for three years now to the pages' wing, and Kally had been gone four years to Carthak, never to come back. Roald had only just returned to the wing, newly knighted. Soon enough Shinkokami would join him; but both her eldest brother and her sister-to-be were so busy she rarely saw them, only heard their voices in the halls from time to time.

At the end of the wing were the rooms her parents shared, but they were much the same as Roald and Shinko; Lia wondered if they spent any time there at all. She rarely saw them within the wing, and outside of it they were much too busy to ease her lonliness.

Days she didn't mind. She was shuttled from lesson to lesson, with her governess and other tutors, learning the skills a princess should know and a few frivolities such as algebra that her parents had permitted her. She spent time among the Court, though she had little interest in the webs spun there and less for the romances and scandals between so-and-so. Sometimes on her walks about the palace or out into the city, trailed by her guards, she would catch a glimpse of her elusive family, blood and adopted alike.

Nights were something different. Lia had never been frightened of the dark; she still wasn't. But the perfect, total lonliness that filtered through the long hallways of the wing chilled her. More often then not she couldn't sleep, not with the absolute silence that slid through the walls and wrapped itself about her.

She walked the halls then, in her white nightgown, feeling like something of a ghost, knowing that guards were about somewhere but flowing past them unseen, small enough yet in build to do so. She had never slept well, not really. But when she was younger she could slip out of her rooms and through the doors, to settle in with Kally or Liam. She could peek about the doors to see the faces of her siblings, to reassure herself they were still there.

Now the only faces she saw at night were those of the paintings that hung in the halls; ancestors she didn't know much of, or knew too much of. Cold eyes with no life that made her shiver when she passed.

Sometimes, now, she would go into Kally's rooms and run her hands over the things her sister had left. Her other siblings would return to her, for now, but Kally would never again enter these quarters, would never again walk these halls. It didn't feel wrong to go there, as it did her brothers' rooms; Kally would not begrudge her the comfort that her room gave Lia. Kally wouldn't mind if Lia curled up in her bed because the covers were different from her own and she could pretend they were Kally. She wouldn't have scolded Lia for spending night-hours in the room and speaking quietly to dolls.

Lia opened the door to her elder sister's rooms and crept in, through the sitting-room and the room Kally used as her 'library' which had once had a different purpose to the bedroom, hazel eyes brighter in the dark then they ever were in day. She froze as she entered, though she didn't frown.

Roald looked up from the book he held and smiled at her, almost apologetic in nature. "Lianne." She stayed at the doorway for another moment, realizing how little she knew of her eldest sibling. "You couldn't sleep?"

"No. It's too empty." The younger Contè entered Kally's room and stood near her brother, needing to crane her neck upwards to see him. He missed Kally, didn't he? Just as she missed everyone.

She hadn't thought that perhaps her siblings might miss her and eachother just as much as she did them, empty rooms in their hearts.

"Roald?" Lia spoke hesitantly, never quite at ease with her eldest brother; she was too much in awe of him, as Jasson and Liam were. They never got to see him grow up, as Kally did.

"Hmm?" A quizzical smile.

"You can call me Lia, you know. Everyone else does." She spoke quietly, wondering how long her brother would stay this time, almost distantly. Perhaps it didn't matter. The room would always be there, in her mind, for him to come back to.

Roald smiled genuinely this time. "Lia, then. Kally loved this book...battle tales about the K'mir. Romaticized, of course...would you like to hear some? I don't believe I've heard them in ages. Mother used to read it to Kally and I."

"I'd like that." Lia smiled back. The rooms were filling up again.

**END**

**End Notes:**CC? Review? Death threats? Marshmellows?


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